Graphic Events: A Realist Account of Graphic Design

Once an object of graphic design leaves the designer’s computer, it enters an unpredictable and precarious existence in the world. Posters, packaging and flyers may be ripped from walls, littered on streets or left to fade in shop windows. This chasm between the conception and the material life of designed objects is familiar and apparent to all, but is curiously under-theorized within the discipline.

Graphic Events calls on graphic designers to embrace the uncertainty their designs face as they circulate in the world. It proposes that, rather than ignore the fact or to attempt to solve the problem, designers should play with this unpredictable process.

This volume contains interviews with and essays by philosophers, graphic designers, photographers and artists, as well as a poem by Philip Larkin and an excerpt from a memoir by Patti Smith that engage with graphics in the real world.